Much of the public discussions about the decline of trust in mainstream news focuses on polarisation, misinformation, or changing audience behaviour. The recent Triggernometry podcast conversation with Richard Minter, however, approaches the issue from a different angle. It frames the loss of trust not as a temporary reputational problem, but as a structural failure in the relationship between news institutions and the publics they claim to serve. Trust, in this account, is not an abstract virtue but a form of social credit. Once audiences feel that this credit has been spent or abused, institutional authority no longer carries the weight it once did.
A central concern in the discussion is a growing confusion about what news is for. One model treats news as an authoritative account of events, stabilised through institutional consensus and presented as settled fact. The other treats news as an ongoing process of inquiry, grounded in investigation, scepticism, and accountability to the public rather than to power. The discussion between Minter, Foster and Kisin makes clear that trust erodes when audiences perceive that the first model has displaced the second. When journalism begins to resemble official messaging, it ceases to function as news in the civic sense and is instead experienced as institutional narrative management.
This distinction matters because the social function of news has historically been to provide a shared, contestable account of reality that allows people to orient themselves collectively. News reduces harmful rumour, enables public scrutiny, and supports social coordination by making power visible and open to challenge. When that function weakens, people do not stop needing information, but they do stop relying on the institutions that once supplied it. The result is not neutrality, but fragmentation, as audiences migrate to alternative sources that may offer certainty or identity rather than verification.
Technology is identified in the discussion as a decisive force in this shift. Previous technological changes, such as the telegraph, altered the speed, reach, and economics of news while reinforcing professional norms through customer accountability and competitive verification. Contemporary digital platforms, by contrast, have detached information flows from those institutional constraints. For many people, particularly younger audiences, news no longer arrives as a distinct activity or appointment. It is encountered incidentally, through networks and feeds, without the visible editorial structures that once framed trust and responsibility.
The discussion does not suggest that technology has removed the need for journalism. Instead, it argues that technology has stripped away the institutional wrapper that once carried it. This creates both risk and opportunity. While digital tools and artificial intelligence may reduce some costs of gathering and processing information, they do not automatically reproduce the professional judgement, investigative discipline, or ethical restraint that public-interest journalism depends upon. The concern raised is that once these capacities are lost, they are difficult to rebuild, regardless of how much information circulates.
Viewed through the lens of foundational media, these concerns point to a deeper problem of institutional design rather than audience failure. News is best understood as civic infrastructure, not simply as content or commodity. Its legitimacy depends on accountable relationships, transparent processes, and the ability of publics to see how claims are tested, corrected, and challenged. When news organisations lose sight of this and rely instead on prestige, scale, or proximity to authority, trust becomes something they attempt to manage rather than something they continuously earn.
Foundational media principles therefore resist both state control and monopolistic commercial control as default solutions. Centralisation may offer short-term stability, but it weakens the very mechanisms through which trust is sustained. The alternative is not the abandonment of standards, but their redistribution. Community and independent media traditions represent an attempt to seed journalistic capacity at the lowest viable levels of society, where accountability is practical rather than symbolic and where credibility is tested through proximity, reciprocity, and consequence.
This distributionist approach treats trust as something that grows from lived relationships, rather than something imposed through authority. Local and independent media are not immune to error or bias, but they operate within denser networks of recognition, where mistakes are visible and corrections matter. In this sense, they provide a counterweight to the globalised forces of network capitalism, which tend to abstract information from place, responsibility, and consequence. By anchoring news in social contexts where accountability can be exercised meaningfully, they help to stabilise trust without enforcing uniformity.
The discussion also gestures towards the value of procedural traditions rooted in common law and common sense, not as nostalgia, but as safeguards against overreach. These traditions emphasise evidence, proportionality, contestability, and restraint. Applied to media, they suggest a focus on due process rather than moral authority, and on inquiry rather than declaration. Such principles offer a practical counterbalance to transnational corporate models of media governance that concentrate power while diffusing responsibility.
The challenge, then, is not to restore trust in legacy institutions as they once were, but to reimagine how the social function of news can be sustained under contemporary conditions. This requires investment in distributed investigative capacity, shared professional norms without centralised control, and networks that allow local and independent actors to collaborate without surrendering autonomy. Without this work, the erosion of trust will continue to create vacuums that are filled not by better journalism, but by louder certainty and deeper division.
Foundational media offers a way forward by treating trustworthy news as a civic capability rather than an institutional entitlement. It asks how societies can maintain the positive functions of news, scrutiny, shared orientation, and accountability, while avoiding the risks of centralised authority. In doing so, it reframes the current crisis not as the end of news, but as a moment of institutional reckoning and renewal.